I am really excited that the long overdue battle over immigration reform and a path to citizenship has finally begun in earnest. While I am heartsick at the reason, it is good news that common sense gun safety laws are once again being discussed in this country almost two decades after we finally passed the Brady Bill. And the on-going, never ending budget fights remain urgently important in terms of stopping more damage to middle class and poor people in America. I know I will be engaging daily in the vitally important battles over all these issues, and I expect my progressive allies all over the country will be as well.

But I remain troubled, profoundly troubled, by the fact that fundamental economic issues seem to be the last thing on anybody’s minds in DC. Our economy may be slowly getting better, but we still have a very serious jobs crisis in this country- nowhere near to full employment and not on a path to get there for many years to come. Our manufacturing sector is still only limping along and our trade deficit remains catastrophically high. Our infrastructure is still badly in need of repair. Wages for most workers are still stuck in neutral or slipping compared to inflation, and a third of those who found new jobs after losing them in the great recession are being paid less than in the old job. Our housing market is getting stronger in some metro areas, but is still very weak overall in terms of prices, homeowners under water, and numbers of foreclosures and empty homes.

And looming over these economic problems is quite literally the elephant in the room: these gargantuan Too Big To Fail, and apparently Too Big To Jail, Wall Street financial conglomerates.

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There is finally, finally, finally some momentum starting to build toward accountability for the biggest banks. The results of the election will determine whether it continues to build or completely fades away.

I will be the first to admit that there is a certain irony in that last sentence. Tim Geithner and Eric Holder haven’t exactly been jumping up and down in excitement to prosecute the Too Big To Fail banks for their evident fraud in pumping up the housing bubble and making billions off it. The wheels of justice have turned pathetically slowly. Martin Luther King said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it curves toward justice”, but in the case of banks this big and powerful, that arc is even longer. Inch by inch, though, the wheels long stalled have begun to move, and now the pace is beginning to pick up.

In the last several weeks, JP Morgan (twice), Wells Fargo, and now this week Bank of America have all been taken to court by different parts of the government. And while we don’t know how things will turn out, none of these are small potato cases. Together, they represent the broadest cases against the TBTF banks that we have seen since the crisis hit. And the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities task force co-chair says that more are coming.

My colleagues in the Wall Street accountability movement, burned by the lack of action from the DOJ for 4 years, have been understandably skeptical of the RMBS task force, especially when it took what seemed like forever to bring its first case. But without that commission from the President, I don’t think any of these cases would have been brought, because it focused resources (definitely not enough, but some) on investigations, and it raised the political stakes on not doing anything.

Where this heads next will be fascinating. I suspect what Schneiderman and the other more aggressive prosecutors in the task force want to do is to build a web of tough, broad cases against these banks in order to given them maximum leverage. Such a legal strategy could well reap major benefits as investigations proceed.

But imagine a scenario where President Obama loses, and the Democrats lose the majority in the Senate.

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Some grown-ups who have been noticeably absent from this conversation have been the heads of the country’s major corporations, who talk a good game about deficit reduction but haven’t invested the time, money and political capital necessary to jolt the political system from its dysfunctional equilibrium.

That’s about to change. Last week, the first battalion of CEOs showed up in Washington, reporting for duty.

All hail our corporate grownup generals, who have marched on Washington to do battle with the "hysteria, histrionics and hyperbole." Aren't we blessed?

Digby gives us the 411 on our new generals:

David M. Cote J.D.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Honeywell International Inc.
$37,842,723 annual compensation

Alexander M.(Sandy) Cutler
Executive Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President and Chairman of Executive Committee, Eaton Corporation
$13,586,010 annual compensation

Gregg M. Sherrill
Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Tenneco Inc.
$5,750,640 annual compensation

Martin L. Flanagan
Chief Executive Officer, President and Executive Director, Invesco Ltd.
$13,420,458 annual compensation

Mark T. Bertolini
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President, Chairman of Executive Committee and Member of Investment & Finance Committee, Aetna Inc.
$10,556,335 annual compensation

Thomas J. Quinlan III
Chief Executive Officer, President and Director, R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company
$6,059,714 annual compensation

James Dimon
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President and Member of Operating Committee, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
$23,105,415 annual compensation

All of our generals are signature members of the US Chamber of Commerce, and they are very, very concerned about the national debt in this country. Not concerned enough to pay more taxes, of course, but still, they're adults and they're very, very concerned. A year ago, during the debt ceiling battle, they sent a letter to Congress, imploring them to do more to settle the Very Important Question Of Our National Debt, to no avail. Having been robbed of a victory then, or another opportunity to battle over the debt ceiling this summer, they have decided to revive the issue by becoming the Adults In The Room once again.

I don't know. I just can't imagine Jamie Dimon giving any thought to anyone in the below $1,000,000 compensation range, can you?

Last night's 60 Minutes segment suggesting people run for Congress to profit from insider trading was pretty puffy in a number of ways. It seems, for example, pretty stupid to suggest Nancy Pelosi benefited from an IPO investment in Visa in 2005 when she was instrumental in pushing through credit card industry regulation in 2009 as Speaker of the House. Likewise, John Boehner most certainly reaped more benefit from passing out checks from tobacco industry lobbyists on the House floor than he did with any insider trading on stock deals to defeat the public option.

But there is definitely one Congressman who has profited much from inside deals: Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), current Chairman of the House Financial Services committee. Bachus has been unrelenting on his opposition to any derivatives regulation and why not?

Pat Garafalo at ThinkProgress reports that Bachus was hedging on the failure of the economy in 2008 while receiving confidential briefings about it.

Bachus, who was the ranking member of the Financial Services committee at the time (since the Democrats held the house) made about 200 trades as the financial crisis peaked, netting about $28,000. “What we know is that those meetings were held one day and literally the next day Congressman Bachus would engage in buying stock options based on apocalyptic briefings he had the day before from the Fed chairman and Treasury Secretary,” said Peter Schweitzer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, whose work was the basis for CBS’ report. “I mean, talk about a stock tip.”

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I think we can safely say that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that the Wall St. bankers are an outright criminal class. Does anyone other than Jamie "bankers, bankers, bankers" Dimon still say otherwise? It's time we stopped talking about whether they're criminals and started insisting that these people go to jail:

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. ignored or dismissed warning signs about the Madoff fraud even as it earned hundreds of millions of dollars from its relationship with his firm, according to a lawsuit unsealed Thursday.

J.P. Morgan Chase stood "at the very center" of Bernard Madoff's fraud, according to a lawsuit unsealed Thursday. Michael Rothfeld has details.

The $6.4 billion lawsuit, filed in federal bankruptcy court, claims that bankers at J.P. Morgan discussed the possibility that Bernard Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme, worried that a firm of such size was audited by a storefront accountant and called his returns "too good to be true."

"While numerous financial institutions enabled Madoff's fraud, JPMC was at the very center of that fraud, and thoroughly complicit in it," according to the 115-page lawsuit, filed under seal in December by Irving Picard, the trustee seeking to recover money for Mr. Madoff's victims and made public on Thursday.

J.P. Morgan said in a statement that the lawsuit "is meritless and is based on distortions of both the relevant facts and the governing law." The bank said it "did not know about or in any way become a party to the fraud orchestrated by Bernard Madoff."

The complaint seeks the return of nearly $1 billion in J.P. Morgan's profits and fees, and $5.4 billion in damages. It goes into great detail about the bank's alleged efforts, starting in about 2006, to make money by offering products tied to Mr. Madoff through investment funds that fed money to him.

J.P. Morgan only reported its suspicions of Mr. Madoff to British authorities in late October 2008, two months before he surrendered, the lawsuit said. In a suspicious activity report filed with Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency, the bank said the performance of Mr. Madoff's investments appeared to be "too good to be true—meaning that it probably is."

Even that warning was made in passing, the lawsuit said. It came after a London employee of J.P. Morgan was threatened while trying to redeem the bank's money from a Madoff-related fund by a fund employee who mentioned having "Colombian friends" who could "cause havoc," adding, "we know where to find you."

It's time to stand up to violent rhetoric and demand change. And that's exactly what Drummond Pike, CEO of the Tides Foundation has decided to do by going to the advertisers of Glenn Beck's program--the one that so inspired and motivated domestic terrorist Byron Williams (and yes, I'm going there)--and telling them their continued sponsorship makes them equally culpable:

Drummond Pike, who along with his organization was recently targeted by an assassin inspired by Beck's program, penned a letter on Friday to the Chairmen of the Boards of JP Morgan Chase, GEICO, Zurich Financial, Chrysler, Direct Holdings Americas, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Lilly Corporate Center, BP, and The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc.

In it, he detailed the alarm he felt over having a "person carrying numerous guns and body armor" attempt to start a "revolution" by murdering "my colleagues and me."

To say we were "shocked" does not adequately describe our reaction. Imagine, for a moment, that you were us and, had it not been for a sharp eyed highway patrolman, a heavily armed man in full body armor would have made it to your office with the intent to kill you and your colleagues. His motive? Apparently, it was because the charitable, nonpartisan programs we run are deemed part of a conspiracy to undermine America and the capitalist system, which is hogwash.[..]

I respectfully request that you bring this matter of your company's sponsorship of hate speech leading to violence to the attention of your fellow directors as soon as possible. I believe no responsible company should advertise on Fox News due to its recent and on-going deplorable conduct.

While we may agree to disagree about the role our citizens and our government should play in promoting social justice and the common good, there should be no disagreement about what constitutes integrity and professionalism and responsibility in discourse - even when allowing for and encouraging contending diverse opinions intelligently argued. This is not a partisan issue. It's an American issue. No one, left, right or center, wants to see another Oklahoma City.

The next "assassin" may succeed, and if so, there will be blood on many hands. The choice is yours. Please join my call to do the right thing in this regard and put Fox News at arm's length from your company by halting your advertising with them.

Now, because I can already hear the pearl clutching from the right wing blogs: THIS IS NOT CENSORSHIP OF GLENN BECK. Glenn Beck can continue to say anything that floats through the transom of that brain of his and no one--including the government (which is how the First Amendment applies)--is stopping him from speaking. But Glenn Beck (or anyone, in point of fact) is not guaranteed a national platform with corporate sponsors. This, you right wing lurkers, is your vaunted free market at work. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that their advertising dollars is sponsoring rhetoric that is inciting violence. Those corporations simply have to decide if it's worth the possible business lost if they continue to do so.

There are multiple campaigns that reach out to Beck's sponsors. My personal favorite is StopBeck.com and they've been very successful. The NY Times reported a total of 296 sponsors have dropped Beck. In fact, they reported that due to combined efforts, Glenn Beck's program in the UK have not had a sponsor for almost EIGHT MONTHS. That should also give you an idea of how this is not a profit-driven move for Murdoch and Ailes, because there's no way they're making a profit off Beck's program. You can get a list of Beck's remaining sponsors here.

So an SEC whistleblower contacts the agency, and is assured by the enforcement attorney working on JP Morgan that it's a "confidential" investigation. The attorney then turns around and dimes the guy out to his employers.

Where do the Republicans find these candidates? Do they vet them carefully for moral and ethical problems, and then recruit the ones who don't pass?

More importantly: Why didn't the SEC stand up for whistleblowers by throwing the book at this sleazebag? Maybe the answer lies in the description of Demos as a "politically wired" Republican attorney:

George Demos is a Republican Congressional candidate from Eastern Long Island whose Web site bears the slogan "Fighting for Freedom," and touts his service as an enforcement lawyer in the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. A bio says that he "handled some of the SEC's most significant investigations," including that of Ponzi scheme artist Bernard Madoff, and "worked tirelessly on the cases that never made the headlines."

But one case that never made headlines was his own: Demos' campaign Web site and public statements omit any reference to a report last March of the SEC's Inspector General (IG), which found he had improperly disclosed protected, nonpublic information about a whistleblower to the counsel for that whistleblower's employer, a major Wall Street bank, JPMorgan Chase. The IG's charges of misconduct grew out of an SEC probe that began in 2003 of JPMorgan and other big financial institutions suspected of illegal market practices.

Demos has denied he did anything improper, and his campaign declined to comment on the matter. But documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) -- a non-partisan non-profit based in Washington -- confirm that Demos was the staff attorney who was cited in the IG report for violating SEC rules. The IG referred the case to the agency's management for possible disciplinary action, but the SEC took no action. Soon after that, Demos quietly resigned from his job and launched his bid for a seat in the House of Representatives.

But the confidential information that Demos disclosed was used by a JPMorgan lawyer against one of the bank's own employees, a whistleblower who had alerted the SEC to possible wrongdoing by his employer, according to the report and other documents, some released under the Freedom of Information Act.